The emerging ‘affective turn’ across different disciplines has demonstrated how affect serves as indispensable driving forces in the constitution of practices in social life. Against this backdrop, the materialization of affect in the field of linguistic/semiotic landscape is still short on empirical backgrounds, especially in the urban context of China. In this study, by combining approaches of sensory ethnography and walking ethnography, I conducted fieldwork in the ‘old commercial port area’, Jinan city, to investigate affective regimes of how affects are discursively organized and situated through different semiotic artefacts, so as to liminally transform homogeneous cityscapes during standard urbanization and commodify such renewed city identities. Based on various ethnographic data such as photographs and walking narrative interviews, the results showed that generic liminality and concrete affects of nostalgia and multilingualism-friendliness are created, coordinated, and coherently regimented for branding purposes as a symbolic economy, by tracing chronotopic and socio-historical trajectories of the imagined 'semi-colonial' China era. During this process, multilingual, multimodal, and multi-layered spatiotemporal resources are mobilized for reproducing and humanizing cityscapes as affective experiences. In doing so, the transformed urban semioscapes radically subverts local and societal normalcies and cultivates citizens’ new perceptions, values, and identities towards local heritage, multilingualism, and global multiculturality. The intersections and interplays between language, psychosocial constitution of space, urbanization, and authenticity are also proposed and discussed.